I don't know if you guys have done it before, but I think it would be cool to see "Guess The Elo" between the two of you. Maybe you could each have viewer/coaching clips set up to test each other?
I'm a new ranked player and am in bronze. ~50 games played around ~57% win rate. I definitely see some people who just cant control their characters, but I actually see a lot more people who are pretty decent on their champ in a bronze context (good kda, high win rate, high cs/minute), but either have really poor decision making or map awareness. I have terrible map awareness, and often don't know what to do to win a game. I play top lane and one game the enemy mid irelia got insanely fed (10+ kills in 15 minutes), but then just kept tower diving 1v2 or 1v3 and giving us free kills. They knew how to play irelia, but had no idea what to do after they got fed.
I do think it could also equally be that your mind laner also didn't know how how to play into Irelia though. Irelia is a skill check champion in that if you don't know what she does she can easily kill you even level 1. Other champions just don't have that kill threat like she does if you don't know what they do e.g. you will never die to a Syndra or Vel'koz level 1, because they just don't have the damage. Because people dying like that is something you can see all the way up to platinum and they just brute force it.
If you win lane go split push opposite side of objective.Watch minimap so u don't die. If they go for you go outside vision then repeat when they stop chasing. That should get you to at least platinum.
You will for sure climb. The potential is there If you can point out mistakes and be aware like that, you’re already better than most in low elo. Trust the process and keep getting better.
@@thecraws23 Yup, I am a gold jungler but silver laner. And I am trying to play just Trynda atm looking into fundamentals from Alois. Trying to see how wave management goes, and mid game see when the enemy is trying to scout for a objective and as u said splitpush the other side. I got to get better in my early game though.
@@RedGalaxyFishboneI am emerald 1 pushing for diamond. I play mid top, vlad and kassadin.My edvice: Learn how to slow push then reset or dive. When you stack few waves and dive someone they lose most amount of gold and xp.trind is great for that. Then split. You shold almost never group with trinda couse he is not that good at 5v5. Try to snowball earlygame and end in mid game couse if you don't you can get outscaled. Hlhf😊
your take on platinum being a holiday rank "if you get to platinum, you're probably on your way to emerald, or you would have never got to platinum in the first place" is very true for me. i spent 5 years peak silver, about a year peak gold. once i peaked platinum i hit emerald a month later
I really love the reflections that arise from your exploration of the top lane role. It's really great to see you expand your perspectives and learn something new
What to work on in each rank: Iron - learn what your champ does and learn to deal damage Bronze - work on micro and character control test Silver - fundamentals, be engaged and think about most actions Gold - consistency test for fundamentals and matchup Plat - use lull states and gather information Emerald - focus on details that add up, keep stage 4 down, value of kills, win cons, take responsibility Diamond - big picture, next level champ mastery, draft starts to matter, coach cupcakes ACE Did not fully go through master, will finish later :DD
It's actually crazy how spot-on the gold analysis for junglers is. I have a friend who is silver 2 and mains jungle spamming Nocturne whereas I have climbed to Emerald playing support and whenever I watch him play I can see the exact mistakes pointed out that gold junglers typically make. I have watched this guy be level 5 on Noct having 2 camps in his topside available to clear skip over them to take Void grubs on spawn despite having a recalling mid laner and a shoved in top laner, only to die cos he got spotted out and collapsed on and then just rage at his team in chat for, "Not coming to help me". He constantly makes bad calls like this every game and blames his teammates in chat. He's a fantastic guy out of the game but whenever he plays League he turns into a completely different person when things go bad. I think 'mental' for people at lower elos is a huge issue because people struggle to accept responsibility for their decisions being incorrect due to a lack of game/champion knowledge, and it's easier or more 'convenient' to blame other people rather than recognizing your own flaws. On that last point though, I think most people at lower elo's aren't playing with the intention to learn so that they can become better players. They're playing for the sake of climbing rank as it's rewarding to reach whatever elo they want to. 'Learning' for these types of people seems like a chore most likely cos they view League as just a game so putting in external effort (VOD reviews, watching coaching vids, consuming content to improve, etc.) is seen as boring. It's akin to highschool where you'll attend your classes and do the work there, but any homework given to you makes you roll your eyes (But in most cases you'll still do the homework or else you'll face consequences). This mentality is wild to me though because they're spamming so many LoL games that if they took 15-30 minutes out of their 6-7 hour League grind to sit there and watch a video on 'How to jungle as nocturne' and actually use that information in game they'd effectively cut their climb in half and get to gold/plat/emerald so much faster.
I have a buddy like this. He is in emerald. He's got great hands, but he can't get out of emerald due to mental. A combination of refusing to improve his league IQ and just tilting too easily. He just assumes everyone sees the game the way he does, and he gets mad if they don't. I don't mind him much, but his ego can be annoying at times. Especially when the little knowledge he does have is from me coaching/teaching him when we used to duo lol.
@@faveology Yeah. League is a rough game. It's a 5v5 game where at any point your teammate can throw and then you just play at an unfair advantage. It's so easy to rage and tilt at league bc youre either stomping or getting shit on, and if youre getting stomped by a fed adc bc your botlane just sucks then its not fun for anyone
@@sekischro5093my biggest advice is to watch vods and question your own decisions that you make in game and how it impacts the rest of the game compared to pros or other high elo players. It helped me get through diamond and I sit mid master
huge respect to you guys... is not necesary to name but there is other "coaches" that literally disrespect iron/bronce players by saying "make sure your mouse/ keyboard is connected". Hope you the best and reach more people. Definitely gold content.. +suscribed
Never would have thought I would hear about that submarine going to the titanic in a broken by concept episode, but as always managed to put a smile on my face.
Something i find people overlook/dont speak about very often is just the basic skill creep of the ranked system. Moving from silver to gold i felt the enemy players get faster and take advantage of things like fog occasionaly, and then i moved to plat and felt another increase as the enemies just felt way more dangerous, killing me at what i felt like was 1 frame worth of missclicl. Then i made it into emerald and i felt like the smallest mistake on my part would blow my lane open and ruin the game. You have to constantly be improving all skills you have developed, not just be looking for new ones. The best experience i ever had was vsing a diamond 1 smurf while i was in emerald 3. He showed me how much time i REALLY had vsing normal emerald players and helped me level up my threat assessment one little notch.
I'm one of those players that jumped straight into ranked as soon as I was level 30 and a lot of this really rings true for me. I didn't even know all of the champions names, much less what they did or what lanes they usually were in. And I've been there for a couple years now for the other reasons y'all talked about - with a full time job, even with a ~60% WR now that I've actually made an effort to really learn things and focus on my gold income and fighting, I just don't have enough games in a season (or split now) to climb. I should've been able to peek into Bronze last split, but then I had to pack for a big move so I'm still yet to even do placements. And I also really think that at this point in my league experience, I really wish that I'd needed a level 50 account before I was allowed into ranked. I may have still tanked my MMR, but I feel like i probably would've had a better time. Anyway as always thanks for the content y'all make!
It’s been four months since you commented this, and in that time I’ve climbed from Iron II to Gold IV. Where are you at? Do you still play league? How is it handling a life and the game?
@@nemilu I've only played like 30 games tbh because I've had a lot of life changes (I've moved and gotten a new job etc). But I am in Bronze now, and I'm sitting at an 83%WR on my main champ and a 75% WR on my secondary :)
I have to admit Curtis was 100% right in my case, I reached platinum and I felt content there and stopped pushing and after dropping back down to gold I was reignited with the desire to push forward again
I think for me, the biggest eye opener to league has been just playing a lot of normal games with way more skilled players than myself. My old friend group was around bronze-gold level way back when the old rift was still a thing. I viewed the game very ignorantly. Only KD mattered. Killing enemies was winning. Dying was losing. If we got more kills than the lane opponent and lost, it was team diff. My new friend group that I met in uni around 5 years ago, also played League and invited me to do some casual normal games. I had at that point been on a few years of break after my old friends stopped playing. But these guys were high plat-high diamond elo in soloQ. So I just got CRUSHED every game. After being humbled a lot, I started picking up on things. Like having my toplane wave frozen on me a few times, made me realize that I can't just ignore the wave. Being out farmed and getting stat checked even though I was 2-0, made me realize I can't roam while ignoring the state of my lane. I started understanding lane priority, after first understanding how important experience and gold from minions is. Being slow pushed under the turret with 2+ waves of minions, allows the enemy laner to freely join skirmishes, forcing me to choose if I want to help my team at the cost of being set massively behind. Much more moments like these, got me into watching educational league content for the first time. Not just SivHD juke montages, uberdanger's full AD meme build videos, etc. That helped it really click. Made me see the game as this complex dance of information, decisions, and execution.
I jungle with high emerald low diamond players (two of them to be exact) and a mixture of everyone in between and I see the game wayyy differently then most people and anytime I play with someone who's closer to my elo (gold and below, I'm bronze) I'm like wait a minute, they didn't ward this? He's low health, why is he still pushed up? Is your monitor on? Now, one thing I don't like about playing with my high elo friends is they take all the kills and never rotate with those kills. So many times that their super behind laners come and kills me on an objective that should never be contested 3v1 and they're still toplane/midlane pushing waves. Not saying I'm good at the game or anything but laners who's behind should never be able to rotate to an objective and contest it.
behind laners have no chance but take stupid risk to have chance at getting back into game. Otherwise they just autolose the game so of course they gonna look for contest and roams. All your winning teammate has to do is snatch tier2 for insane income, get 4 item and then join fights where they clean up.If you're ahead, you never pull the trigger. You keep yourself even with enemy, which technically means u're perma ahead of them if they can't find plays on the rest of your team. So yeah, if u're toplaner Avoid ur team like plague, except where u can cleanup, as midlander roam everywhere, as botlane , sup and jg you fight together usually with mid, while toplane poses threat: enemy either fights 4 of you as 5 (you win game by split push) , enemy sends enough player to deal with turbo fed top (they lose against 4 of you vs 3 or 2 enemy) or they go all in on toplaner, which for you means free objective. Ignoring hostile roams might look like inting, but it's just the formula to eventually win with great gold advantage
what you say about emerald (hardstuck here, peak D4 last 2 splits) at 49:55 is so true and i always forget it. i just end up queueing for the sake of trying to climb but i'm playing at such a low intensity. when i feel a game is lost i kind of lose the momentum and enjoyment, and i subconsciously take the match less serious even if i'm still trying. i think that is my issue
It's pretty crazy how much better the playerbase has gotten over time. Back in the day I got plat by literally just having ok-ish character mechanics but lacking all the fundamentals of macro and information gathering. I then took a 7 year break and I'm amazed how even bronze and silver players have such good fundamentals novadays. I sort of expected to get to gold by just winning my lanes and kiting people to death like I did before, but it turned out no. I really had to start filling in the huge gaps in my understanding of the game to even get into high bronze I'd say. Especially in regards to macro and resources. Like, now even if I win lane every time I'd still lose every game to macro mistakes, and that was not the case before. Even stuff like vision is just insanely good. I remember it being a thing you had to constantly remind bronze and silver players of, and having supps that just, didn't ward. Now they like, fight over vision before an objective comes up without prompting, even in bronze! It's crazy stuff.
Just got to the gold part in the vid. I'd say my experience climbing to silver so far has been that junglers in bronze constantly went for cross-map plays. Like, if enemy jungler ganks top, they will do drake and vice versa. So you saying that gold players don't have that sort of awareness felt kinda weird. Definitely there were some absolutely inane junglers, and the suicidical objective calls where players just refuse to back down are very much a thing. But I'd say the basic concept of cross mapping is something that exists down in bronze now, in I'd say most games.
I completely agree with you. I've never seen another competive game where bronze/silver is played at such a high level. Just because emerald+ players are nearing a cieling which is worlds beyond, it doesn't mean that the floor isn't also very high.
I really value your insight into EACH rank. You guys both have a super niche (but cohesive) and extremely potent understanding of general behaviors of players at different levels... it HELPS surprisingly to see what knowledge helps at each level. Some of us players get paired up with a HUGE range of elo brackets. I play with Bronze, Silvers, Golds, Plats, Emeralds, and sometimes Diamonds and MAsters. Each type of game has differing qualities of players. Knowing how they all act is ... sort of meta...
PLEASE guys if you can make shorter summarised videos with animations.I love this logical rhinking explanations and attacking the riot problems you are 100% real and og but please guys think for the people who have limited time but love your work.Hope this becomes a reality
Thanks for reading out my question! (I'm the last mailbag submission) It was a bit more long winded than i intended while writing it so my bad if it was confusing lol. Great episode guys :)
You guys talking about how a masters player understanding the beauty of pro play was really inspiring. I would love to be able to understand the game to that extent some day. I've now seen the light.
About your question @ around 38:30 , I've been stuck in Platinum from season 4 to 11. Once I took the game seriously in season 12 I reached High Diamond and even ended in Master by the end (that's when I first wrote to the mail bag). I definitely coasted for those 9 years in Platinum. And it was really tough getting out of Platinum. I needed to polish a ton of fundamentals and after many, many months everything clicked and I shot up about 300 LP almost effortlessly. Before there was Emerald, it was a super egotistical rank because you are so close to Diamond but the difference was huge. I think mentally this is where a lot of players get stuck because they know quite a bit and have a decent feel for the game but it's hard to accept the nature of it being a team game and your role in that team.
the problem with league is that every elo has its own playstyle that you need to adjust to. You cant play the same way in plat as you played in gold. YOu cant play the same way in Emerald as you palyed in Diamond or Master. Some things simply dont work.
I have the same experience.. I sometimes Coach gold player's for fun and have to almost scream at them to not go for a 1v2 stupid play or actually just sidelane. The instinct to just outright omega int is very strong in this elo
You guys should look at the UPS driver drill and how it relates to climbing league. Could be a good exercise for your students in league to see what they're thinking about during lane and to get them to be mindful and focused. There's vids on RUclips
Playing bot games was one of the best things I did when I was learning league. I didn’t seriously play ranked until my friend and I were able to 2v5 intermediate bots. It forced us to make better decisions, and put us in a carry mindset. This is a great drill for people to do, even if you’re experienced with the game. Once we got better, we tried to 2v5 bots without dying, which is way easier said than done. One single stupid play would basically end the game, as we considered a death defeat. It really changes your mindset to make better decisions and make you look at the game in a bigger picture, rather than just kills.
I jumped in ranked right away a few years ago when I started playing only Aram lol and I hit iron 2. But I slowly started to learn the game more and take it a little more seriously and my map and character knowledge is a lot better and im pretty close to hitting emerald now.
Emerald for me was my lazy I played for 10+ years in low diamond, 0 effort/autopiloting playing every champions, every role. And as soon as I started being intentional with my games and played mid only I went from emerald / old d4 to master in 1 split. The home of stage 4 issues.
@@raygun2180yes if you’re well above it. But a bronze or low level silver player cannot 1 v 9 out of iron like that. It’s why iron has people who appear better and shouldn’t be there. Playing ranked before you’re ready will legit lock you into that Leo because you hosed your mmr. You know stuff but not enough of everything. It’s frustrating and can 100% confirm the part about playing ranked before you’re ready.
@@ryangrady5977 couple things wrong about this. 1. When I was low silver I could still 1v9 or at least win p much every iron game 2. There is no iron players who shouldnt be there they have the rank because they deserve the rank if they were better theyd climb. Making excuses helps no one 🤷♂️ 3. If you actually know enough to be a bronze/silver player you will climb to those ranks every single friend ive had who accepts that has gotten out but the like 4-5 who can’t eventually stopped playing. 4. Playing ranked before youre ready is 100% true i agree with that and I push every new player to play tons of bots even with me. However, (just read #3 again)
@@ryangrady5977ok I think that I could be someone in this category (Im about lv 57 and started playing around Arcane, only playing here and there till bout 2/3 months ago) prior to me playing ranked I would play draft where I would often play against/with people above my current iron rank (often it was bronze and silver players but occasionally I’d get into a lobby full of emeralds) which lead me to thinking I was ready for ranked. So what do you think I should do to progress further as a player? Should I just go back to playing drafts?
As an Emerald player always trying to crack Diamond this was super insightful for me, that hunger you talked about is true I know like a lot of emerald players I can be diamond it's just that last little bit of stuff to tighten up!
I'm one of those long term emerald players, split 3 or 4 in emerald. I have improved as a player over the last 1-2 splits but I haven't been able to get out of emerald and stay out of emerald.
Awesome video. I have played League on and off for years. I enjoy off meta stuff and support main up to Silver 1 before I start to get board and move to a new game. Once made it to Gold 1 during a try hard seasons end. I just started playinging again, and my mechanics blow. I am relearning all the items and new map format. I have about 11 games under my belt. What is really interesting is that I am no longer depending on my mechanical skills. I used to just out play people. Now I am managing waves, and properly trading in lane. I am setting up jungle invades and stressing when to base properly. I am very confident that I am high bronze to low silver with my current level... and I have no mechanical skills. Very eye-opening.
As someone that started ranked around level 50. I placed iron 3 and for a few months was hardstuck in iron until one day when playing everything clicked, my wincon clicked, my champion clicked, the game's visuals clicked, then just slowly climbed to plat 3 over 2 years. Your assessment that iron players shouldn't even be playing ranked was correct
After you guys learn ADC and SUP is Curtis going to learn Jungle and Nathan MID? I think that could make for really interesting discussion, especially if the two of you have a bit of a different interpretation of some elements of the role. Keep it up guys you’re killing it in my eyes!!!
when nathan said you dont see platinum platinum every season but see emerald emerald every season, i was like what the f, emerald was introduced last season, you couldnt have been emerald, either you got it last year and now this year and thats it
Well it was Emerald was prob around high plat in older seasons or low diamond; which is about right. That's an area I was stuck in for a while until I found Nathan's channel. And Gold 3~Plat 4 is right around the vacation range. People often stopped at Gold 4/Gold 5 for their ranked season reward and didn't bother to improve, or they improved until they reached Plat 5/4 and then continue to gradually push into that "Emerald" range.
@@Freakattaker well, in that regard, i can kinda relate, i was kinda hard stuck gold for 3 years, but then when they announced that emerald is coming next split, i grinded my ass into plat 4, literally after reaching it, i was strangely underwhelmed. I thought i would be happier, but just ended there and thought this is enough and left it for the season, waiting for emerald to go live. If not for the emerald news, honestly, i might have stayed in vacation mode and never reached plat, so looking back, still happy for my dedcation at the time :DDD
Gold and plat really do feel like those ranks where you as a player are finally confident on your champion and now to transition you have to be confident in your decision making, and especially learn to just let the wins come to you. gold and plat are the biggest "led but lost" or "slow to end" games where players dont realize they already won the game 15 minutes ago and dont have to do any more.
Quantity of games 0layed eoesnt mean ACTUAL mastery of a champion. It just means you played zed for 3000 games in terrible QUALITY games. Champ mastery points only gauges qauntity of games played. Not quality
guys if you flesh out this concept and smooth it out you could probably make a “what to focus on to escape X elo” iron: learn the game, plug your mouse in, make sure you have stable internet bronze: learn what champions do. start focusing on abilities, CDs, start focusing on your champion mastery: play style silver: focus on champ mastery, trying to play the wave (offense vs defense, gank timers) gold: stop dropping cs. layering abilities, and watching jgl timers
Adding to gold: whenever i watch over some gold games to Analyse them compared to silver i notice that the players increase in overall pacing, be it the fluidity of their mechanics as well as their decisiveness. There is less time spent walking weird circles on the map, less time in the shop and less time chaining abilities. Everything seems faster even if the choices are still incorrect.
38:48 I've definitely seen those "I've been in plat for 5 years" accounts out there. Some people will get to plat and not feel the need to grind ranked until Emerald or diamond. I felt that way for a long time. I definitely had the mechanics to push much higher for a long time, but the ranked anxiety and stress of playing potentially hundreds of more games to climb felt pointless. Eventually I got over that and just started playing and climbed, but it took a while to make myself actually take that next step to get into higher ranks.
STORY TIME! I was Emerald (Platinum before Emerald existed) for 9 seasons. NINE. SEASONS. I finally hit diamond last season, peaking D2, but settling around D4. The funny thing? The "breakthrough" for me happened because I started playing a different role. I play mid mainly, with support as secondary... I always kind of felt lost when the game put me bot lane and just sort of went through the motions, following my adc around as an enchanter. But a year ago after getting my secondary role 3 games in a row and losing 3 games in a row, I decided I absolutely hated feeling like I didn't know what I was doing when I got support, so I switched to queueing support primary and decided to really practice it for at least a couple months. Best decision I ever made in league. I can say with confidence that EVERYONE should main support for a while and really focus on improving in that role. The freedom that supporting affords you allows you to understand the flow of the game better - much more of your mental energy can be allocated to macro, thinking about where you're most needed at any given time, finding roam timers, practicing jungle tracking, thinking about wincons and objective setup, where vision is actually needed and how to best acquire that vision, etc. It also teaches you how to better play from behind if you're playing something like a mage support. You have no idea what "squishy" means until you start playing mage supports and you run into a solo laner while you're down 4 levels and a full item. It teaches you to play sharper in skirmishes/teamfights and forces you to anticipate enemy movements and skills more, due to there being a smaller margin for error. Not to say that Support is a difficult role (it really isn't). I'm only saying that it causes you to practice different skills within league that translate well to other roles (Jungle can sort of be similar, but it's just not the same imo). I climbed to Diamond for the first time when I started maining support, but found, to my surprise, that when I switched back to mid I was actually a much better mid player as well, and was able to get to diamond reliably when I was playing with intensity. This sounds kind of lame, but getting diamond for the first time in SoloQ was actually kind of an emotional moment for me. I had resigned myself to the idea that I had peaked in ranked and couldn't improve, and that lack of confidence was carrying over into other areas of my life as well. Sometimes you need to get outside your comfort zone a bit and come back with a refreshed perspective. Now I'm excited about continuing to improve and I want to try to break into Diamond 1 and beyond.
he is right. i was plat hardstuck and then quit for 2 years. i only came back because i know i cant be diamond and i wanted to check out the new emerald rank. actually climbed after 1 month of straight Ls to emerald and fell out instantly. been there like 10 times, just not consistent enough to keep the rank. chilling in p3 and im ok with it
See I’ve peaked emerald 3/4 as a mid plat 2/3 player. I would also add, as someone that has been playing for around 4 years, friend group plays a vital factor. I would say the quality of my games and its intensity, depend on the people you queue with regularly. When I first started league, I was introduced to it by someone that was peak diamond and hovered plat in s9/10, my brother and I picked things up way quicker then most because we were getting stomped every game and were forced to adapt because we had to and peaked low gold high silver our first season. However, I took a break from league in school, a lot of my friends either stopped league entirely or just didn’t play pc games, and a lot of my friends currently are around bronze. I find that my intensity has dropped and I play less ranked, at when I do it’s and at a lower intensity.
Speaking as an irelia player, low emerald feels like the last rank you can climb out of by consistently getting a large enough lead in the first 5min off level 2 and 3 all ins without doing any super fancy and carry off that gold, exp and decent teamfighting with almost no macro or anything else
As someone that played against diamond/master people just 1-2 years ago, when i really was into league, then came back after a month long break and now plays in low gold elo (i even started in silver 4) i gotta say that randomness is a huge factor in low elo games. Silver elo is really stressfull, because playing there feels like i have to babysit my whole team or they just instantly die/get engaged on, which isnt always easy to do as a toplaner. Id rather play against higher elo in a less chaotic game, than against bad players in a very chaotic game.
I love this statement about dives. Dives are the exact same thing as losing game ganks. You may think people are competent enough to pull off a dive but for the most part they are not. They don't want to take the first tower shot, they don't know how to drop the aggro, they trying to land a skills that are not essential in that moment (i.e blitz instead of walk up and E he will cast Q and miss). There is so many things that can go wrong and 9/10 times all of them goes wrong. When I climb out of gold to emerald I'm not doing dives, invades and so on. I don't trust those players, I don't trust those people are capable of pressing right buttons in right order in right moment.
For the top % of players for ranks want to mention that its top 5% of players at diamond at the moment when the split ends its actually usually top 10% based off last split
Damn, i have been emerald entire last season, and im STILL learning and somehow missing some details all the way back from silver. Thats Unbelievable! At least it shows how far can a person get with ONLY a champion mastery. :D
Earlier in my league experience, I remember having a lot of painful moments missing skillshots, so I played champions such as Sona. Now that I'm playing champions like Lux and Ahri again(granted are not the most mechanically intensive champions), this struggle has come back into the spotlight. Whenever there is a really intense team fight, or it's 2 v 2 and I'm the only one with a CC ability, I get this feeling of tensions/tightness in my hand, arm, and chest. I also feel this immense pressure in my head and my mind is racing with thoughts of "Do I use my R,E combo now?" or "Do I Flash+Q now?" Usually what happens is that hesitation goes for too long and the moment is lost, or I'll just say "fuck it" and rush in with my dash ability and completely whiff my main engage tool. Overall, it just feels like my ability to use the mouse to hit targets or use skillshots is not accurate and when I try to be more accurate it requires so much focus and effort. I also get overwhelmed when trying to press my keys quickly and have found myself making embarassing fumbles that way too. Sorry for the long post, but would love any tips on how to improve that mind body connection with mouse and keyboard.
Also when you wait and think too long, your movement will show you are looking for it, a good player will see this and understand you are looking for an opening to engage and counter it. You have to be decisive and quick to surprise your enemy. This worked wonders. You could even R on ahri and hold e until your opponent tries to dodge and then use w and aa and make them confusingly sidestep left and right until they give up and then use e. Holding skillshots that cc is super powerful. No need to throw it offensively all the time. Using it for disengage after dishing out tons of dmg is insanely strong.
One big thing for me as a new player is skins. Dont get me wrong I absolutely love customization options in games, but when starting playing league it almost feels like learning 5 times the amount of champs.
...Everyone I know in Emerald fits Nathan's description, but Curtis is also right. Most of them are missing very core fundamentals in their gameplay. Wave management, recall timers, etc. The only people I know in Emerald who don't fit these descriptions are people who are really Diamond-Masters players who are ELO sitting for leagues.
Speaking as a Bronze top lane player, the rules are definitely not hard and fast. The variance in player skills and talents is wild. There are some players who have incredible trading and wave management skills, but have no idea how to team fight. There are some with great mechanics who just go absolutely phsycho at every moment of the game and either snowball or int feed. There are junglers who counter jungle and dumpster the other jungler for the 15 minutes, then just run it down on repeat because they don't know how to play after laning phase. It goes on and on like this with various examples that contradict the generalizations made in this video. I think high Bronze/Silver players are actually pretty good at the things they can do, they just can't do the rest of them and put a complete game together.
The first season I really gave ranked a hard try was season 5. Plat back then was way more of a prestige than it is now. But ever since then I GOT HARDSTUCK in the same bracket even though comparing my play (and I guess anyone back then) has drastically improved. I think my biggest problem is definitely not taking it as serious as I could and also never spent my own time learning how to build/rune/summoner spells. According to game. So many adc games ive lost where im not really behind but I do absolutely no damage/ have no survivability because my whole time learning the strategies and mechanics of the game were based off amateur level character guides from like mobafire and after all that I feel using guides and following people works for a while but doesn't teach you how to think for yourself according to the game or strategizing yourself which I feel is needed when you get to Emerald+ level you can't just depend on being THE main character like everyone used to say. (Believe it or not thats what people said you had to be) and I have now learned it really isn't the case. Kda consistent. Farm consistent even when I should lose but never realized how important these "little" things are when it comes to your ability to have agency. Especially on the big kid role of adc lol. I spent some time since last season playing other roles and it opened my eyes to how much those little things mean a LOT more the higher you go. The lower you are it makes sense it doesn't matter as much because honestly if you don't snowball in low elo it might be too hard to still win a game but the mistakes are SO clear that it is easy to and keeps you from learning the REAL game of league if you know what I mean.
My favorite point brought up in this whole video was the one about VALUE of kills. I checked my history after hearing about it and realized yeah, I go 13+ kills low deaths most games in Emerald but half the time it puts my ult on cd/ my summs or makes me have to base and that energy could have been spent maybe 30 seconds or a minute later on a secured drake or turrets.. Wow
I started laughing so hard when Curtis said “I guess it makes sense to start with iron Nathan” idk why but that was really funny to me. I love this podcast
My peak was unemployed Emerald II Viego one trick, people where playing so well, dodging everything, moving through the map, good mechanics, It was sooooooo dificult compared to everything else. I got a job eventually and then fell to Gold I / PLat III and just stay there forever
The only time I was ever stuck in Platinum was way back before Emerald existed. So really at that time, by today's standards, I would have been stuck in Emerald. My first season I was silver then I ran straight through gold into plat.
Decided to try Mid as OTP Malz for the first time this season and I’m currently sitting P2 (my career peak) with a 65% w/r. I have no doubt Emerald will be attained and would have to now agree with the comment of Plat being a “Holiday” rank. Once you start putting all the pieces together, Plat doesn’t feel like a massive difficulty spike compared to gold. It isn’t until I start hitting Emerald threshold games that I’m like “ok this is league of legends now.” As often these lobbies have long time Emerald or even Diamond peak players running about.
13:00 lmao .. i just back to league from a 5 years break and was placed iron as much as this might sound harsh but for the majority of the This elo this description almost accurate.
this video's analysis is good from a general perspective. anecdotally however, ive played league on and off since the start (have the bowser rammus skin wherever that came from). i mained ADC for a long time and made plat early on. from that high-point i finished high gold or low plat every season i played maining different roles each season. i take my role flip-flopping as the main reason i got hard-stuck in gold. this season i did my placements with nearly a leaver or afk in every game and placed IRON 3. ive been stuck in iron for nearly a hundred games. i discovered this channel and think it has an amazing approach to learning even outside of league. it's helped me objectively improve. however, the more i play with intent to improve and not caring about the outcome of the game, ive actually been more convinced that my improvement journey has nothing to do with rank. i usually would quit whenever i'd hit gold, and this season ive actually played more. it almost feels like riot rather me play more but rank up slower cause they know i quit around gold. i agree with the learning/bettering approach of this channel and think its immensely important for slow positive and compounding progress. but since im a dev, i also understand that the business side would ask developers to keep players engaged longer in the season. with the data they have on the backend, i dont know a manager that wouldnt be tempted.
This is literally why they went from 1 season to 3 splits. Drives more player engagement and slows down re-climbs with the soft resets. It's complete bullocks. There's also the fact that if u lose a lot u'll sometimes get a really easy game because the system is checking if it needs to drastically tank your MMR to get u placed to a better rank more quickly; and vice versa with a really hard game if u win a lot (it feels pretty bull in the moment, but it does make sense to try and combat smurfs/ppl who rusted out of a rank after a long break)
@@Freakattaker ah good point. it's too bad cause imho league is one of the best games. i still have a lot of fun playing. but i don't like getting jerked around with moving goal posts and hidden metadata being used to tweak players stats through semi-forced wins/losses. but what do i know, ive never managed a competitive game at this scale and i wonder what the alternative to EOMM or whatever even would be. deep down, i bet this very issue i have with the game is why it continues to keep me hooked 🤣
I wish I could learn support from either of you! Watching the vids makes me wanna switch to jng or mid so I could sign up to the courses. I played a lot of normals with diamond+ adc's and got placed to silver 2 when I tried ranked. Not sure I agree with it (and as I was typing this they said silver is about concious incompetence so maybe I do belong here, hahaha) 😂
12:54 [Iron] "Irons are the scraps of people" Had my dying xD Sorry Nate it was genuinely funny I think what you meant it is the "residuals of serious players" 27:30 [Silver] "Its like when you're becoming conscious" Like an AI gaining sentience
Not an advocate for jumping into ranked either but I understand why players do it. Sometimes you truly do get a false sense of the game when you're used to norms and that over confidence makes you walk away with a misconception of what the game actually is. When I learned programming, I struggled in my early phases because a lot of beginner friendly resources did their best to hand hold me. It was very easy to view myself as a savant and sure enough, the progress got boring because I thought I knew what I needed to. The fastest improvement I made in that journey was being slapped in the face with real course work and having to come to terms with just how truly ill equipped I was. To compare it to league, it was the difference between "I must be one of the best players in bronze" to "Oh wait, I'm a bronze player."
With the bot games, add a restriction of "wait until 20mins before taking a inhibitor" as you can just hard push and get one by around 10mins and have the super minions push for you as the bots will still send the under leveled jinx to deal with them.
I don't know how i feel about gold jungle statement, not sure what its like in NA (I play in EU) but I find gold is about the rank where I expect to see junglers who invade and at least have some idea about tracking jungle pathing. I tend to find the biggest problem in gold junglers is bad threat assessment, taking ganks that are high risk of throwing a lead to the enemy team or bad calls to force something like objectives on teams back timers. I think with junglers we can split it into two groups for gold depending what champion pool that player has, there are gold junglers who have mastered good clears but are very clueless to the enemy junglers pathing as they are overly focused on just there clearing (typically farming junglers like diana/karthus mains fall into this group) . the other gold junglers group tend to be pretty good at jungle tracking and invades but are often missing reliable resources in pursuit of high risk gains (Kindred/lee sin mains im looking at you) I think its more clear at gold that junglers have started to master SOME elements of the role but have huge gaps in other areas, this is the rank i expect a kindred who is used to ether going 15 kills or feeding like crazy, because they lean into what they have been strong at works but haven't put the work into mastering the areas that hold them back
As someone who came from dota2 2 years ago, i totally agree range differences are HUGE (@9mins). the initiation range of blink dagger + ability could be 5 flash distances away in league terms. It took me a while to be comfortable being closer to enemy champions in the mid game. It probably took me 200 normal games + to untether myself from what had been purely intuition in dota2. I specifically remember playing jarvan in aram in my like 20th game and feeling like this is a short range initiation lol, i had no idea. I started off in support with a friend and he was telling me what to do and i would ask questions on why for a while till i moved to mid
The Jarvan engage range feeling short as piss compared to something like Blink Slardar or Blink ES is real tho loool. Honestly a large part of why Zac ganks feel so bull in LoL because not many other champs have such crazy engage range without having to expend a global ult.
Bro you describing iron and low bronze really made me feel like i deserve to be there. My rank is inflated because my mechanics are really good but i am full braindead when it comes to actually playing out a match. If i didn’t have the mechanics i would easily drop from plat to bronze 1 at best. I try to improve my macro and i do a lot of research and studying but i can’t get anything to stick. The best way i can describe it is imagine having a completely empty head, its almost like being in a dream where things are just happening to you, nothing makes sense, and all you can do is react. It’s a really hard place for me to be in because when i play other games I have very high levels of comprehension and can see 15 steps ahead and predict and aggress, i even reached top 100 players NA in PUBG back in the hayday. However, I’ve been playing league since 2012 and for this game alone I’ve never had the ability to read and understand the game, which is why i keep playing because its the one game i can’t mentally lock in with and solve.
Emerald is the new Elo Hell. I've gotten 2 accounts to Master and guess what I spent the most time struggling in Emerald because your opponent is good enough that you don't just shit on them every game and your team is stupid enough to throw a game whenever they want and you CAN NOT control them because your team is either /deafen or /mute all and your ping is limited so you can't even shot call your team to do anything
From my expierience I was stuck in silver, gold elo for 4 years starting from 2016 One thing that boosted me to master elo is to draw conclusion every play you make even if the play was good you need to ask yourself what you couldve done better... And most important is to mute all
I really liked the points about Emerald. From playing in Emerald a LOT, I'd like to add something to the poor attitude: People claim the game is over early and give up, even though both teams are likely to make several game-throwing decisions in the next 20 minutes. AKA the players are good enough to recognize a throw, but no one is good enough to take full advantage of those throws.
I think this was a very interesting youtube video. I have a group of friends that have been playing league for probably like 5+ years at this point I was there for most of the groups start. One of my friends and myself have played for 10+years and are both High diamond players consistently. Most of the group is around High silver to High gold and one friend being a low plat player. The concepts you talk about and what rank should have said concepts is way far off in our group. Most of everyone in our group knows what to do but just doesn't do it Since myself and my friend have been there to help answer questions and walked them through it. For example, Trading patterns wave control and like obj. control but they fail to actually put it into practice. for example in one of our games I was playing supp and my friend told me he was gonna freeze the wave when there wasn't a freeze possible and was just creating a slow push. So i don't know if my friends are brain dead or just bad at the game. regardless thanks for sharing your thoughts on league.
At first I was kind of insulted by the long term platinum comment, but I was stuck in plat 2-1 during seasons 5-8. I got emerald the instant it was released so I guess it makes more sense if you look back at most like 3 years
Hey Curtis and Matt, do you have any tips on how to deal with people taking over your lane? As in they walk mid and play there instead of bot or top. What can I focus on to improve when that happens?
I really enjoyed the overall concepts you guys brought to the table. Just something about emerald, but also about the current state of the game: Emerald is just all over the place. There is absolute no consistency whatsoever. In the same match, you have a player that goes 40k damage in a 30 minutes game, and 2 other players that go 8k damage in those same 30 minutes. That is so wrong. It just blatantly shows the clear difference in players skill. And its like that every game. I'm a Pantheon OTP top, and every single game I am the top damage of my team, and half of the time of the entire game. All the while my mid, ad or jungler dont get over 8k damage. I understand support doing little damage, but surely not the other roles. And surely not in emerald. I'll always accept that my friend who peaked Silver will never get past 15k. He is just not good at trades, at making real use of his abilities and all. But I can't accept that from a emerald player. Hell man, even when I go support with something like Nautilus, Thresh, whatever, I go 20k damage or close to it.
I'll add something here: I try playing to improve most of the time, if not all the time and I always try to understand what I could have done bette, what I did wrong, etc. But it's so frustrating having to play games where if I do one or two mistakes, it's simply over, because my teammates will most surely not pick up any slack, because of how badly balanced is emerald right now. I'm forced to play to pixel perfection because, most times, at least 2 teammates are barely gold level of gameplay. That's frustrating, bro. Really is. It's too taxing on mental.
I’m not sure they read the comments, but I was wondering if they could do a podcast about server differences, like if you are challenger in LAN are you really challenger or just mid diamond on a “normal server”, and generally stuff like that in terms of server comparison.
hey i was wondering if u guys have a "how to play from behind" , like more so about how to "lose lane gracefully" and what "playing with intensity" means video
Playing with intensity is just a catchall phrase for locking in/focusing up/don't play lazily. Some examples of improving your intensity when playing: -Think about things in the loading screen (lane match up? how u want to play the lane? where is the enemy JG starting? what are u trying to improve on this game?) -Minimize external distractions: Turn off music, exit Discord calls (barring duo Q), take care of your needs before playing (bathroom break, shower, meals, sleep, etc.) -Playing with the intent to do EVERYTHING possible to win and improve, and not just "getting in some games of league because I'll eventually rank up if I'm playing" 3 blocking helps with it because it's naturally harder to play better as your brain tires out from more and more games
4:31 Had a friend that insisted on playing kindred adc, mostly because they were afraid of jungle role. I'd guess most of these off roles are just wanting to play the champ, but not wanting to go for another role. Or are duoing with someone on x role already...
[JUNGLE ONLY NA PLAYER] I've never gotten past platinum (albeit I started in Season 13 Pre-season), and I pray to God I can get back this rank soon. They hit platinum jungle right on the nail. I have mastery of basic jungling so I get 30 kills in draft pick or silver+ every game. But the games I lose or int a little, it's because I autopiloted and saw that (for example) the amumu had ult and i saw the lux is river with him so I'll just egotrip and go lose the 1v2 because i get one shotted.
I like this setup, but I just want to say that i went to grandmaster by being a one trick pony and playing safe and not being very adaptable or all around. But I guess I could be the exemptions from your good points and i could just feel that i could not go to challenger, because thats the time where its better to be versatile with other champions in different team setups, which i couldnt do and thats why i felt like i was stuck there and not able to climb further.
As a perma plat player. It's mainly because I don't put in the games to get to emerald. I play at most 50 games a split or a year depending on how may I need for competitive.
Listening to that makes me certain that I'll never be able to get out of Iron. If i need to know all ranges, damages and abilities for all champions to even get out of Iron... I simply don't have enough time 😮
It's pretty damn easy to know every ability and it's range. Jus spam arams or norms .Took me a month of playing normals/Aram when I first started game 2 years ago to learn it all
I’m a former s3 gold player and ngl I see iron footage that looks mechanically way more sophisticated than anything I’ve ever done or seen in my games … yeah safe to say I’m never touching ranked bc I know where I’ll end up
As someone who was bronze in 2022 and iron as a returner, I feel like the iron one is a bit simplified. Most iron players aren't that bad at their champion, runes and items but we are terrible at virtually all other areas of the game. Sure, there's a few outliers who are easier to fight than a bot, but that isn't the norm. For me the main problems in iron is being unable to escape ganks (even if I'm 10/0 the jungler can just kill me as a mage and take bounty), being late to fights, profound lack of vision (what even is in vision score I use all my wards), and if I don't play yuumi then low cs (2-4) becomes a problem. By playing yuumi I can fix being late to fights, needless deaths, low gold, gank vulnerability and lack of endgame influence and it gets me s ranks but she is useless solo and I'm trying to main xerath for more agency. Thx for the video tho it helps a lot :D
6:00 50 champs when it cam out? bro. season one were maybe 15-20 champs haha p.s. i am an emerald mid. got a lot of free time lately. played only this split over 100 matches on mid. and u guys are so right. i miss sometimes the small details of what i can do with my champ and what not. and yes. i am completely losing my mind xD
I always wanted to hit platinium and I finally hit it when they added emerald. All my friend told me that I wasn't trully platinium because old platinium is new emerald so I just grinded too emerald because of it.
I don't know if you guys have done it before, but I think it would be cool to see "Guess The Elo" between the two of you. Maybe you could each have viewer/coaching clips set up to test each other?
Theres a site called rankdle or something like that i believe that could make it easier. Or people could send in their clips
Yea Ive noticed pros have no clue about such topic and they often are wrong😂
Problem is you could be a smurf or someone that's not consistently playing rank and that's a way to trick the system
Yeah I was just thinking of this. They’d probably avoid it because if they guess wrong it could make them look bad 😭
@@Lone_Wolf_91 It's hard if you can't see their mouse clicks
I'm a new ranked player and am in bronze. ~50 games played around ~57% win rate. I definitely see some people who just cant control their characters, but I actually see a lot more people who are pretty decent on their champ in a bronze context (good kda, high win rate, high cs/minute), but either have really poor decision making or map awareness. I have terrible map awareness, and often don't know what to do to win a game. I play top lane and one game the enemy mid irelia got insanely fed (10+ kills in 15 minutes), but then just kept tower diving 1v2 or 1v3 and giving us free kills.
They knew how to play irelia, but had no idea what to do after they got fed.
I do think it could also equally be that your mind laner also didn't know how how to play into Irelia though. Irelia is a skill check champion in that if you don't know what she does she can easily kill you even level 1. Other champions just don't have that kill threat like she does if you don't know what they do e.g. you will never die to a Syndra or Vel'koz level 1, because they just don't have the damage. Because people dying like that is something you can see all the way up to platinum and they just brute force it.
If you win lane go split push opposite side of objective.Watch minimap so u don't die. If they go for you go outside vision then repeat when they stop chasing. That should get you to at least platinum.
You will for sure climb. The potential is there If you can point out mistakes and be aware like that, you’re already better than most in low elo. Trust the process and keep getting better.
@@thecraws23 Yup, I am a gold jungler but silver laner. And I am trying to play just Trynda atm looking into fundamentals from Alois. Trying to see how wave management goes, and mid game see when the enemy is trying to scout for a objective and as u said splitpush the other side. I got to get better in my early game though.
@@RedGalaxyFishboneI am emerald 1 pushing for diamond.
I play mid top, vlad and kassadin.My edvice:
Learn how to slow push then reset or dive. When you stack few waves and dive someone they lose most amount of gold and xp.trind is great for that. Then split. You shold almost never group with trinda couse he is not that good at 5v5. Try to snowball earlygame and end in mid game couse if you don't you can get outscaled. Hlhf😊
Now that’s a proper Nathan Mott intro if I ever heard one
Bro hitting it hard on this one❤
he delivered
"TOOR-HUNDRED AND TOOR"
ON SNABELY YOU AINT LINE
bbc'ers is so gross
your take on platinum being a holiday rank "if you get to platinum, you're probably on your way to emerald, or you would have never got to platinum in the first place" is very true for me.
i spent 5 years peak silver, about a year peak gold. once i peaked platinum i hit emerald a month later
Congratulations on emerald and improvement
Yeah same I think its very true
Yeah same. I hit plat and soared to p1. But then i got anxious and tilted queued back to p4 💀
Yep, and most of my friends went the way of: "meh I'll just take it easy in gold" lol
@@curtiswalker8457 i got to p2 99 lp and the next game my internet disconnected and I lost like 40 isch lp and I also got back to p4 lol
I really love the reflections that arise from your exploration of the top lane role. It's really great to see you expand your perspectives and learn something new
What to work on in each rank:
Iron - learn what your champ does and learn to deal damage
Bronze - work on micro and character control test
Silver - fundamentals, be engaged and think about most actions
Gold - consistency test for fundamentals and matchup
Plat - use lull states and gather information
Emerald - focus on details that add up, keep stage 4 down, value of kills, win cons, take responsibility
Diamond - big picture, next level champ mastery, draft starts to matter, coach cupcakes ACE
Did not fully go through master, will finish later :DD
Thank youuu
what is stage 4
@@bashtin_zz the new bbc episode covers them, so you can get an in depth guide on it
What about higher ranks?
@@bashtin_zz cancer
whenever I run out of long videos to listen to at work you guys come through at the perfect time.
It's actually crazy how spot-on the gold analysis for junglers is. I have a friend who is silver 2 and mains jungle spamming Nocturne whereas I have climbed to Emerald playing support and whenever I watch him play I can see the exact mistakes pointed out that gold junglers typically make. I have watched this guy be level 5 on Noct having 2 camps in his topside available to clear skip over them to take Void grubs on spawn despite having a recalling mid laner and a shoved in top laner, only to die cos he got spotted out and collapsed on and then just rage at his team in chat for, "Not coming to help me". He constantly makes bad calls like this every game and blames his teammates in chat. He's a fantastic guy out of the game but whenever he plays League he turns into a completely different person when things go bad. I think 'mental' for people at lower elos is a huge issue because people struggle to accept responsibility for their decisions being incorrect due to a lack of game/champion knowledge, and it's easier or more 'convenient' to blame other people rather than recognizing your own flaws.
On that last point though, I think most people at lower elo's aren't playing with the intention to learn so that they can become better players. They're playing for the sake of climbing rank as it's rewarding to reach whatever elo they want to. 'Learning' for these types of people seems like a chore most likely cos they view League as just a game so putting in external effort (VOD reviews, watching coaching vids, consuming content to improve, etc.) is seen as boring. It's akin to highschool where you'll attend your classes and do the work there, but any homework given to you makes you roll your eyes (But in most cases you'll still do the homework or else you'll face consequences). This mentality is wild to me though because they're spamming so many LoL games that if they took 15-30 minutes out of their 6-7 hour League grind to sit there and watch a video on 'How to jungle as nocturne' and actually use that information in game they'd effectively cut their climb in half and get to gold/plat/emerald so much faster.
I have a buddy like this. He is in emerald. He's got great hands, but he can't get out of emerald due to mental. A combination of refusing to improve his league IQ and just tilting too easily. He just assumes everyone sees the game the way he does, and he gets mad if they don't. I don't mind him much, but his ego can be annoying at times. Especially when the little knowledge he does have is from me coaching/teaching him when we used to duo lol.
@@faveology Yeah. League is a rough game. It's a 5v5 game where at any point your teammate can throw and then you just play at an unfair advantage. It's so easy to rage and tilt at league bc youre either stomping or getting shit on, and if youre getting stomped by a fed adc bc your botlane just sucks then its not fun for anyone
truee
im emerald and need to focus on learning instead of "climbing"
@@sekischro5093my biggest advice is to watch vods and question your own decisions that you make in game and how it impacts the rest of the game compared to pros or other high elo players. It helped me get through diamond and I sit mid master
huge respect to you guys... is not necesary to name but there is other "coaches" that literally disrespect iron/bronce players by saying "make sure your mouse/ keyboard is connected". Hope you the best and reach more people. Definitely gold content.. +suscribed
Never would have thought I would hear about that submarine going to the titanic in a broken by concept episode, but as always managed to put a smile on my face.
Something i find people overlook/dont speak about very often is just the basic skill creep of the ranked system. Moving from silver to gold i felt the enemy players get faster and take advantage of things like fog occasionaly, and then i moved to plat and felt another increase as the enemies just felt way more dangerous, killing me at what i felt like was 1 frame worth of missclicl. Then i made it into emerald and i felt like the smallest mistake on my part would blow my lane open and ruin the game. You have to constantly be improving all skills you have developed, not just be looking for new ones.
The best experience i ever had was vsing a diamond 1 smurf while i was in emerald 3. He showed me how much time i REALLY had vsing normal emerald players and helped me level up my threat assessment one little notch.
Sooo true in emerald kaisa vs ez real is manageable in lane but boy oh boy diamond plus ezreal is all up in my behind
I'm one of those players that jumped straight into ranked as soon as I was level 30 and a lot of this really rings true for me. I didn't even know all of the champions names, much less what they did or what lanes they usually were in. And I've been there for a couple years now for the other reasons y'all talked about - with a full time job, even with a ~60% WR now that I've actually made an effort to really learn things and focus on my gold income and fighting, I just don't have enough games in a season (or split now) to climb. I should've been able to peek into Bronze last split, but then I had to pack for a big move so I'm still yet to even do placements.
And I also really think that at this point in my league experience, I really wish that I'd needed a level 50 account before I was allowed into ranked. I may have still tanked my MMR, but I feel like i probably would've had a better time.
Anyway as always thanks for the content y'all make!
It’s been four months since you commented this, and in that time I’ve climbed from Iron II to Gold IV. Where are you at? Do you still play league? How is it handling a life and the game?
@@nemilu I've only played like 30 games tbh because I've had a lot of life changes (I've moved and gotten a new job etc). But I am in Bronze now, and I'm sitting at an 83%WR on my main champ and a 75% WR on my secondary :)
I have to admit Curtis was 100% right in my case, I reached platinum and I felt content there and stopped pushing and after dropping back down to gold I was reignited with the desire to push forward again
I think for me, the biggest eye opener to league has been just playing a lot of normal games with way more skilled players than myself.
My old friend group was around bronze-gold level way back when the old rift was still a thing. I viewed the game very ignorantly. Only KD mattered. Killing enemies was winning. Dying was losing. If we got more kills than the lane opponent and lost, it was team diff.
My new friend group that I met in uni around 5 years ago, also played League and invited me to do some casual normal games. I had at that point been on a few years of break after my old friends stopped playing. But these guys were high plat-high diamond elo in soloQ. So I just got CRUSHED every game.
After being humbled a lot, I started picking up on things. Like having my toplane wave frozen on me a few times, made me realize that I can't just ignore the wave. Being out farmed and getting stat checked even though I was 2-0, made me realize I can't roam while ignoring the state of my lane. I started understanding lane priority, after first understanding how important experience and gold from minions is. Being slow pushed under the turret with 2+ waves of minions, allows the enemy laner to freely join skirmishes, forcing me to choose if I want to help my team at the cost of being set massively behind.
Much more moments like these, got me into watching educational league content for the first time. Not just SivHD juke montages, uberdanger's full AD meme build videos, etc. That helped it really click. Made me see the game as this complex dance of information, decisions, and execution.
I jungle with high emerald low diamond players (two of them to be exact) and a mixture of everyone in between and I see the game wayyy differently then most people and anytime I play with someone who's closer to my elo (gold and below, I'm bronze) I'm like wait a minute, they didn't ward this? He's low health, why is he still pushed up? Is your monitor on? Now, one thing I don't like about playing with my high elo friends is they take all the kills and never rotate with those kills. So many times that their super behind laners come and kills me on an objective that should never be contested 3v1 and they're still toplane/midlane pushing waves. Not saying I'm good at the game or anything but laners who's behind should never be able to rotate to an objective and contest it.
behind laners have no chance but take stupid risk to have chance at getting back into game. Otherwise they just autolose the game so of course they gonna look for contest and roams. All your winning teammate has to do is snatch tier2 for insane income, get 4 item and then join fights where they clean up.If you're ahead, you never pull the trigger. You keep yourself even with enemy, which technically means u're perma ahead of them if they can't find plays on the rest of your team. So yeah, if u're toplaner Avoid ur team like plague, except where u can cleanup, as midlander roam everywhere, as botlane , sup and jg you fight together usually with mid, while toplane poses threat: enemy either fights 4 of you as 5 (you win game by split push) , enemy sends enough player to deal with turbo fed top (they lose against 4 of you vs 3 or 2 enemy) or they go all in on toplaner, which for you means free objective. Ignoring hostile roams might look like inting, but it's just the formula to eventually win with great gold advantage
Ellie from Ep. 200, I was definitely an emerald doomer haha. All of this feels pretty accurate.
what you say about emerald (hardstuck here, peak D4 last 2 splits) at 49:55 is so true and i always forget it. i just end up queueing for the sake of trying to climb but i'm playing at such a low intensity. when i feel a game is lost i kind of lose the momentum and enjoyment, and i subconsciously take the match less serious even if i'm still trying. i think that is my issue
5:00 -- I am in emerald, and i still get performance anxiety before and during the match first 10 mins, i shiver uncontrollably lol
It's pretty crazy how much better the playerbase has gotten over time. Back in the day I got plat by literally just having ok-ish character mechanics but lacking all the fundamentals of macro and information gathering. I then took a 7 year break and I'm amazed how even bronze and silver players have such good fundamentals novadays.
I sort of expected to get to gold by just winning my lanes and kiting people to death like I did before, but it turned out no. I really had to start filling in the huge gaps in my understanding of the game to even get into high bronze I'd say. Especially in regards to macro and resources. Like, now even if I win lane every time I'd still lose every game to macro mistakes, and that was not the case before.
Even stuff like vision is just insanely good. I remember it being a thing you had to constantly remind bronze and silver players of, and having supps that just, didn't ward. Now they like, fight over vision before an objective comes up without prompting, even in bronze! It's crazy stuff.
Just got to the gold part in the vid. I'd say my experience climbing to silver so far has been that junglers in bronze constantly went for cross-map plays. Like, if enemy jungler ganks top, they will do drake and vice versa. So you saying that gold players don't have that sort of awareness felt kinda weird. Definitely there were some absolutely inane junglers, and the suicidical objective calls where players just refuse to back down are very much a thing. But I'd say the basic concept of cross mapping is something that exists down in bronze now, in I'd say most games.
I completely agree with you. I've never seen another competive game where bronze/silver is played at such a high level. Just because emerald+ players are nearing a cieling which is worlds beyond, it doesn't mean that the floor isn't also very high.
I really value your insight into EACH rank. You guys both have a super niche (but cohesive) and extremely potent understanding of general behaviors of players at different levels... it HELPS surprisingly to see what knowledge helps at each level. Some of us players get paired up with a HUGE range of elo brackets. I play with Bronze, Silvers, Golds, Plats, Emeralds, and sometimes Diamonds and MAsters. Each type of game has differing qualities of players. Knowing how they all act is ... sort of meta...
PLEASE guys if you can make shorter summarised videos with animations.I love this logical rhinking explanations and attacking the riot problems you are 100% real and og but please guys think for the people who have limited time but love your work.Hope this becomes a reality
Thanks for reading out my question! (I'm the last mailbag submission) It was a bit more long winded than i intended while writing it so my bad if it was confusing lol. Great episode guys :)
I think it would be helpful to see the visual from the thumbnail fill out as you guys discuss each tier, probably a lot of work though lol
You guys talking about how a masters player understanding the beauty of pro play was really inspiring. I would love to be able to understand the game to that extent some day. I've now seen the light.
About your question @ around 38:30 , I've been stuck in Platinum from season 4 to 11.
Once I took the game seriously in season 12 I reached High Diamond and even ended in Master by the end (that's when I first wrote to the mail bag).
I definitely coasted for those 9 years in Platinum.
And it was really tough getting out of Platinum. I needed to polish a ton of fundamentals and after many, many months everything clicked and I shot up about 300 LP almost effortlessly.
Before there was Emerald, it was a super egotistical rank because you are so close to Diamond but the difference was huge.
I think mentally this is where a lot of players get stuck because they know quite a bit and have a decent feel for the game but it's hard to accept the nature of it being a team game and your role in that team.
the problem with league is that every elo has its own playstyle that you need to adjust to. You cant play the same way in plat as you played in gold. YOu cant play the same way in Emerald as you palyed in Diamond or Master. Some things simply dont work.
I have the same experience.. I sometimes Coach gold player's for fun and have to almost scream at them to not go for a 1v2 stupid play or actually just sidelane. The instinct to just outright omega int is very strong in this elo
Best part of my Monday morning! Cheers
2 hours lol
I'm really happy that I found this channel
I have been consistently platinum but that's mostly cause I get bored/discouraged once I get there
You guys should look at the UPS driver drill and how it relates to climbing league. Could be a good exercise for your students in league to see what they're thinking about during lane and to get them to be mindful and focused. There's vids on RUclips
Playing bot games was one of the best things I did when I was learning league. I didn’t seriously play ranked until my friend and I were able to 2v5 intermediate bots. It forced us to make better decisions, and put us in a carry mindset. This is a great drill for people to do, even if you’re experienced with the game. Once we got better, we tried to 2v5 bots without dying, which is way easier said than done. One single stupid play would basically end the game, as we considered a death defeat. It really changes your mindset to make better decisions and make you look at the game in a bigger picture, rather than just kills.
I jumped in ranked right away a few years ago when I started playing only Aram lol and I hit iron 2. But I slowly started to learn the game more and take it a little more seriously and my map and character knowledge is a lot better and im pretty close to hitting emerald now.
Emerald for me was my lazy I played for 10+ years in low diamond, 0 effort/autopiloting playing every champions, every role. And as soon as I started being intentional with my games and played mid only I went from emerald / old d4 to master in 1 split. The home of stage 4 issues.
The roasting of iron, sheeeeesh.
But you’re not really wrong! It’s just, tough reality
They are right in the point that you need to be able to 1v9 to be able to get out of iron.
@@user-tg9sk2cp8xp easy to 1v9 toddlers tho tbh
@@raygun2180yes if you’re well above it. But a bronze or low level silver player cannot 1 v 9 out of iron like that. It’s why iron has people who appear better and shouldn’t be there. Playing ranked before you’re ready will legit lock you into that Leo because you hosed your mmr. You know stuff but not enough of everything. It’s frustrating and can 100% confirm the part about playing ranked before you’re ready.
@@ryangrady5977 couple things wrong about this.
1. When I was low silver I could still 1v9 or at least win p much every iron game
2. There is no iron players who shouldnt be there they have the rank because they deserve the rank if they were better theyd climb. Making excuses helps no one 🤷♂️
3. If you actually know enough to be a bronze/silver player you will climb to those ranks every single friend ive had who accepts that has gotten out but the like 4-5 who can’t eventually stopped playing.
4. Playing ranked before youre ready is 100% true i agree with that and I push every new player to play tons of bots even with me. However, (just read #3 again)
@@ryangrady5977ok I think that I could be someone in this category (Im about lv 57 and started playing around Arcane, only playing here and there till bout 2/3 months ago) prior to me playing ranked I would play draft where I would often play against/with people above my current iron rank (often it was bronze and silver players but occasionally I’d get into a lobby full of emeralds) which lead me to thinking I was ready for ranked. So what do you think I should do to progress further as a player? Should I just go back to playing drafts?
As an Emerald player always trying to crack Diamond this was super insightful for me, that hunger you talked about is true I know like a lot of emerald players I can be diamond it's just that last little bit of stuff to tighten up!
Thanks alot for answering my question so quickly! Gonna take a long look at what I want from LOL. Loving the podcast as always
I'm one of those long term emerald players, split 3 or 4 in emerald. I have improved as a player over the last 1-2 splits but I haven't been able to get out of emerald and stay out of emerald.
SAME
do you play enough games?
Awesome video. I have played League on and off for years. I enjoy off meta stuff and support main up to Silver 1 before I start to get board and move to a new game. Once made it to Gold 1 during a try hard seasons end.
I just started playinging again, and my mechanics blow. I am relearning all the items and new map format. I have about 11 games under my belt.
What is really interesting is that I am no longer depending on my mechanical skills. I used to just out play people. Now I am managing waves, and properly trading in lane. I am setting up jungle invades and stressing when to base properly.
I am very confident that I am high bronze to low silver with my current level... and I have no mechanical skills. Very eye-opening.
As someone that started ranked around level 50. I placed iron 3 and for a few months was hardstuck in iron until one day when playing everything clicked, my wincon clicked, my champion clicked, the game's visuals clicked, then just slowly climbed to plat 3 over 2 years. Your assessment that iron players shouldn't even be playing ranked was correct
After you guys learn ADC and SUP is Curtis going to learn Jungle and Nathan MID? I think that could make for really interesting discussion, especially if the two of you have a bit of a different interpretation of some elements of the role. Keep it up guys you’re killing it in my eyes!!!
when nathan said you dont see platinum platinum every season but see emerald emerald every season, i was like what the f, emerald was introduced last season, you couldnt have been emerald, either you got it last year and now this year and thats it
Well it was Emerald was prob around high plat in older seasons or low diamond; which is about right. That's an area I was stuck in for a while until I found Nathan's channel.
And Gold 3~Plat 4 is right around the vacation range. People often stopped at Gold 4/Gold 5 for their ranked season reward and didn't bother to improve, or they improved until they reached Plat 5/4 and then continue to gradually push into that "Emerald" range.
@@Freakattaker well, in that regard, i can kinda relate, i was kinda hard stuck gold for 3 years, but then when they announced that emerald is coming next split, i grinded my ass into plat 4, literally after reaching it, i was strangely underwhelmed. I thought i would be happier, but just ended there and thought this is enough and left it for the season, waiting for emerald to go live.
If not for the emerald news, honestly, i might have stayed in vacation mode and never reached plat, so looking back, still happy for my dedcation at the time :DDD
before emerald was released there were so many ppl who were perma hardstuck D4. i think that’s basically what emerald is now
Gold and plat really do feel like those ranks where you as a player are finally confident on your champion and now to transition you have to be confident in your decision making, and especially learn to just let the wins come to you. gold and plat are the biggest "led but lost" or "slow to end" games where
players dont realize they already won the game 15 minutes ago and dont have to do any more.
Them talking about lacking champion mastery and fundamentals, me meanwhile playing against 500 Champion mastery players in iron gettin shit on
Quantity of games 0layed eoesnt mean ACTUAL mastery of a champion. It just means you played zed for 3000 games in terrible QUALITY games.
Champ mastery points only gauges qauntity of games played. Not quality
guys if you flesh out this concept and smooth it out you could probably make a “what to focus on to escape X elo”
iron: learn the game, plug your mouse in, make sure you have stable internet
bronze: learn what champions do. start focusing on abilities, CDs, start focusing on your champion mastery: play style
silver: focus on champ mastery, trying to play the wave (offense vs defense, gank timers)
gold: stop dropping cs. layering abilities, and watching jgl timers
always excited to jump into these
Adding to gold:
whenever i watch over some gold games to Analyse them compared to silver i notice that the players increase in overall pacing, be it the fluidity of their mechanics as well as their decisiveness. There is less time spent walking weird circles on the map, less time in the shop and less time chaining abilities. Everything seems faster even if the choices are still incorrect.
38:48 I've definitely seen those "I've been in plat for 5 years" accounts out there. Some people will get to plat and not feel the need to grind ranked until Emerald or diamond. I felt that way for a long time. I definitely had the mechanics to push much higher for a long time, but the ranked anxiety and stress of playing potentially hundreds of more games to climb felt pointless. Eventually I got over that and just started playing and climbed, but it took a while to make myself actually take that next step to get into higher ranks.
STORY TIME! I was Emerald (Platinum before Emerald existed) for 9 seasons. NINE. SEASONS.
I finally hit diamond last season, peaking D2, but settling around D4. The funny thing? The "breakthrough" for me happened because I started playing a different role.
I play mid mainly, with support as secondary... I always kind of felt lost when the game put me bot lane and just sort of went through the motions, following my adc around as an enchanter. But a year ago after getting my secondary role 3 games in a row and losing 3 games in a row, I decided I absolutely hated feeling like I didn't know what I was doing when I got support, so I switched to queueing support primary and decided to really practice it for at least a couple months. Best decision I ever made in league. I can say with confidence that EVERYONE should main support for a while and really focus on improving in that role. The freedom that supporting affords you allows you to understand the flow of the game better - much more of your mental energy can be allocated to macro, thinking about where you're most needed at any given time, finding roam timers, practicing jungle tracking, thinking about wincons and objective setup, where vision is actually needed and how to best acquire that vision, etc. It also teaches you how to better play from behind if you're playing something like a mage support. You have no idea what "squishy" means until you start playing mage supports and you run into a solo laner while you're down 4 levels and a full item. It teaches you to play sharper in skirmishes/teamfights and forces you to anticipate enemy movements and skills more, due to there being a smaller margin for error.
Not to say that Support is a difficult role (it really isn't). I'm only saying that it causes you to practice different skills within league that translate well to other roles (Jungle can sort of be similar, but it's just not the same imo). I climbed to Diamond for the first time when I started maining support, but found, to my surprise, that when I switched back to mid I was actually a much better mid player as well, and was able to get to diamond reliably when I was playing with intensity.
This sounds kind of lame, but getting diamond for the first time in SoloQ was actually kind of an emotional moment for me. I had resigned myself to the idea that I had peaked in ranked and couldn't improve, and that lack of confidence was carrying over into other areas of my life as well. Sometimes you need to get outside your comfort zone a bit and come back with a refreshed perspective. Now I'm excited about continuing to improve and I want to try to break into Diamond 1 and beyond.
he is right. i was plat hardstuck and then quit for 2 years. i only came back because i know i cant be diamond and i wanted to check out the new emerald rank. actually climbed after 1 month of straight Ls to emerald and fell out instantly. been there like 10 times, just not consistent enough to keep the rank. chilling in p3 and im ok with it
See I’ve peaked emerald 3/4 as a mid plat 2/3 player. I would also add, as someone that has been playing for around 4 years, friend group plays a vital factor. I would say the quality of my games and its intensity, depend on the people you queue with regularly. When I first started league, I was introduced to it by someone that was peak diamond and hovered plat in s9/10, my brother and I picked things up way quicker then most because we were getting stomped every game and were forced to adapt because we had to and peaked low gold high silver our first season. However, I took a break from league in school, a lot of my friends either stopped league entirely or just didn’t play pc games, and a lot of my friends currently are around bronze. I find that my intensity has dropped and I play less ranked, at when I do it’s and at a lower intensity.
Speaking as an irelia player, low emerald feels like the last rank you can climb out of by consistently getting a large enough lead in the first 5min off level 2 and 3 all ins without doing any super fancy and carry off that gold, exp and decent teamfighting with almost no macro or anything else
As someone that played against diamond/master people just 1-2 years ago, when i really was into league, then came back after a month long break and now plays in low gold elo (i even started in silver 4) i gotta say that randomness is a huge factor in low elo games. Silver elo is really stressfull, because playing there feels like i have to babysit my whole team or they just instantly die/get engaged on, which isnt always easy to do as a toplaner. Id rather play against higher elo in a less chaotic game, than against bad players in a very chaotic game.
I love this statement about dives. Dives are the exact same thing as losing game ganks. You may think people are competent enough to pull off a dive but for the most part they are not. They don't want to take the first tower shot, they don't know how to drop the aggro, they trying to land a skills that are not essential in that moment (i.e blitz instead of walk up and E he will cast Q and miss). There is so many things that can go wrong and 9/10 times all of them goes wrong.
When I climb out of gold to emerald I'm not doing dives, invades and so on. I don't trust those players, I don't trust those people are capable of pressing right buttons in right order in right moment.
For the top % of players for ranks want to mention that its top 5% of players at diamond at the moment when the split ends its actually usually top 10% based off last split
Damn, i have been emerald entire last season, and im STILL learning and somehow missing some details all the way back from silver. Thats Unbelievable! At least it shows how far can a person get with ONLY a champion mastery. :D
Earlier in my league experience, I remember having a lot of painful moments missing skillshots, so I played champions such as Sona. Now that I'm playing champions like Lux and Ahri again(granted are not the most mechanically intensive champions), this struggle has come back into the spotlight. Whenever there is a really intense team fight, or it's 2 v 2 and I'm the only one with a CC ability, I get this feeling of tensions/tightness in my hand, arm, and chest. I also feel this immense pressure in my head and my mind is racing with thoughts of "Do I use my R,E combo now?" or "Do I Flash+Q now?" Usually what happens is that hesitation goes for too long and the moment is lost, or I'll just say "fuck it" and rush in with my dash ability and completely whiff my main engage tool. Overall, it just feels like my ability to use the mouse to hit targets or use skillshots is not accurate and when I try to be more accurate it requires so much focus and effort. I also get overwhelmed when trying to press my keys quickly and have found myself making embarassing fumbles that way too. Sorry for the long post, but would love any tips on how to improve that mind body connection with mouse and keyboard.
Also when you wait and think too long, your movement will show you are looking for it, a good player will see this and understand you are looking for an opening to engage and counter it. You have to be decisive and quick to surprise your enemy. This worked wonders. You could even R on ahri and hold e until your opponent tries to dodge and then use w and aa and make them confusingly sidestep left and right until they give up and then use e. Holding skillshots that cc is super powerful. No need to throw it offensively all the time. Using it for disengage after dishing out tons of dmg is insanely strong.
Sounds like you need to just practice hitting skillshots in a low stress environment until it doesn't stress you out anymore
i find it insane that you didn't use attack move on cursor untill recently, i'm honestly suprised it isn't default
One big thing for me as a new player is skins. Dont get me wrong I absolutely love customization options in games, but when starting playing league it almost feels like learning 5 times the amount of champs.
completely agreed w the delay ranked thing. i feel like that’s a standard in other games, so idky that’s novel for league
...Everyone I know in Emerald fits Nathan's description, but Curtis is also right. Most of them are missing very core fundamentals in their gameplay. Wave management, recall timers, etc. The only people I know in Emerald who don't fit these descriptions are people who are really Diamond-Masters players who are ELO sitting for leagues.
Speaking as a Bronze top lane player, the rules are definitely not hard and fast. The variance in player skills and talents is wild. There are some players who have incredible trading and wave management skills, but have no idea how to team fight. There are some with great mechanics who just go absolutely phsycho at every moment of the game and either snowball or int feed. There are junglers who counter jungle and dumpster the other jungler for the 15 minutes, then just run it down on repeat because they don't know how to play after laning phase. It goes on and on like this with various examples that contradict the generalizations made in this video.
I think high Bronze/Silver players are actually pretty good at the things they can do, they just can't do the rest of them and put a complete game together.
The first season I really gave ranked a hard try was season 5. Plat back then was way more of a prestige than it is now. But ever since then I GOT HARDSTUCK in the same bracket even though comparing my play (and I guess anyone back then) has drastically improved. I think my biggest problem is definitely not taking it as serious as I could and also never spent my own time learning how to build/rune/summoner spells. According to game. So many adc games ive lost where im not really behind but I do absolutely no damage/ have no survivability because my whole time learning the strategies and mechanics of the game were based off amateur level character guides from like mobafire and after all that I feel using guides and following people works for a while but doesn't teach you how to think for yourself according to the game or strategizing yourself which I feel is needed when you get to Emerald+ level you can't just depend on being THE main character like everyone used to say. (Believe it or not thats what people said you had to be) and I have now learned it really isn't the case. Kda consistent. Farm consistent even when I should lose but never realized how important these "little" things are when it comes to your ability to have agency. Especially on the big kid role of adc lol. I spent some time since last season playing other roles and it opened my eyes to how much those little things mean a LOT more the higher you go. The lower you are it makes sense it doesn't matter as much because honestly if you don't snowball in low elo it might be too hard to still win a game but the mistakes are SO clear that it is easy to and keeps you from learning the REAL game of league if you know what I mean.
My favorite point brought up in this whole video was the one about VALUE of kills. I checked my history after hearing about it and realized yeah, I go 13+ kills low deaths most games in Emerald but half the time it puts my ult on cd/ my summs or makes me have to base and that energy could have been spent maybe 30 seconds or a minute later on a secured drake or turrets.. Wow
I just climbed to emerald and I noticed I started dying a ton to support roams and ganks, that's a big difference
I started laughing so hard when Curtis said “I guess it makes sense to start with iron Nathan” idk why but that was really funny to me. I love this podcast
My peak was unemployed Emerald II Viego one trick, people where playing so well, dodging everything, moving through the map, good mechanics, It was sooooooo dificult compared to everything else. I got a job eventually and then fell to Gold I / PLat III and just stay there forever
The only time I was ever stuck in Platinum was way back before Emerald existed. So really at that time, by today's standards, I would have been stuck in Emerald. My first season I was silver then I ran straight through gold into plat.
Decided to try Mid as OTP Malz for the first time this season and I’m currently sitting P2 (my career peak) with a 65% w/r. I have no doubt Emerald will be attained and would have to now agree with the comment of Plat being a “Holiday” rank. Once you start putting all the pieces together, Plat doesn’t feel like a massive difficulty spike compared to gold. It isn’t until I start hitting Emerald threshold games that I’m like “ok this is league of legends now.” As often these lobbies have long time Emerald or even Diamond peak players running about.
13:00 lmao .. i just back to league from a 5 years break and was placed iron as much as this might sound harsh but for the majority of the This elo this description almost accurate.
this video's analysis is good from a general perspective. anecdotally however, ive played league on and off since the start (have the bowser rammus skin wherever that came from). i mained ADC for a long time and made plat early on. from that high-point i finished high gold or low plat every season i played maining different roles each season. i take my role flip-flopping as the main reason i got hard-stuck in gold. this season i did my placements with nearly a leaver or afk in every game and placed IRON 3. ive been stuck in iron for nearly a hundred games.
i discovered this channel and think it has an amazing approach to learning even outside of league. it's helped me objectively improve. however, the more i play with intent to improve and not caring about the outcome of the game, ive actually been more convinced that my improvement journey has nothing to do with rank. i usually would quit whenever i'd hit gold, and this season ive actually played more. it almost feels like riot rather me play more but rank up slower cause they know i quit around gold.
i agree with the learning/bettering approach of this channel and think its immensely important for slow positive and compounding progress. but since im a dev, i also understand that the business side would ask developers to keep players engaged longer in the season. with the data they have on the backend, i dont know a manager that wouldnt be tempted.
This is literally why they went from 1 season to 3 splits. Drives more player engagement and slows down re-climbs with the soft resets. It's complete bullocks.
There's also the fact that if u lose a lot u'll sometimes get a really easy game because the system is checking if it needs to drastically tank your MMR to get u placed to a better rank more quickly; and vice versa with a really hard game if u win a lot (it feels pretty bull in the moment, but it does make sense to try and combat smurfs/ppl who rusted out of a rank after a long break)
@@Freakattaker ah good point. it's too bad cause imho league is one of the best games. i still have a lot of fun playing. but i don't like getting jerked around with moving goal posts and hidden metadata being used to tweak players stats through semi-forced wins/losses. but what do i know, ive never managed a competitive game at this scale and i wonder what the alternative to EOMM or whatever even would be. deep down, i bet this very issue i have with the game is why it continues to keep me hooked 🤣
I wish I could learn support from either of you! Watching the vids makes me wanna switch to jng or mid so I could sign up to the courses. I played a lot of normals with diamond+ adc's and got placed to silver 2 when I tried ranked. Not sure I agree with it (and as I was typing this they said silver is about concious incompetence so maybe I do belong here, hahaha) 😂
12:54 [Iron]
"Irons are the scraps of people"
Had my dying xD
Sorry Nate it was genuinely funny
I think what you meant it is the "residuals of serious players"
27:30 [Silver]
"Its like when you're becoming conscious"
Like an AI gaining sentience
Gurtis and Mathan always bring the quality content ❤
Not an advocate for jumping into ranked either but I understand why players do it. Sometimes you truly do get a false sense of the game when you're used to norms and that over confidence makes you walk away with a misconception of what the game actually is.
When I learned programming, I struggled in my early phases because a lot of beginner friendly resources did their best to hand hold me. It was very easy to view myself as a savant and sure enough, the progress got boring because I thought I knew what I needed to. The fastest improvement I made in that journey was being slapped in the face with real course work and having to come to terms with just how truly ill equipped I was. To compare it to league, it was the difference between "I must be one of the best players in bronze" to "Oh wait, I'm a bronze player."
With the bot games, add a restriction of "wait until 20mins before taking a inhibitor" as you can just hard push and get one by around 10mins and have the super minions push for you as the bots will still send the under leveled jinx to deal with them.
I am an always platinum player however, i dont play much ranked games a season and usualy mentally check out as soon as i get back there
Having your first video game you’ve played be league is crazy
I don't know how i feel about gold jungle statement, not sure what its like in NA (I play in EU) but I find gold is about the rank where I expect to see junglers who invade and at least have some idea about tracking jungle pathing. I tend to find the biggest problem in gold junglers is bad threat assessment, taking ganks that are high risk of throwing a lead to the enemy team or bad calls to force something like objectives on teams back timers.
I think with junglers we can split it into two groups for gold depending what champion pool that player has, there are gold junglers who have mastered good clears but are very clueless to the enemy junglers pathing as they are overly focused on just there clearing (typically farming junglers like diana/karthus mains fall into this group) . the other gold junglers group tend to be pretty good at jungle tracking and invades but are often missing reliable resources in pursuit of high risk gains (Kindred/lee sin mains im looking at you)
I think its more clear at gold that junglers have started to master SOME elements of the role but have huge gaps in other areas, this is the rank i expect a kindred who is used to ether going 15 kills or feeding like crazy, because they lean into what they have been strong at works but haven't put the work into mastering the areas that hold them back
As someone who came from dota2 2 years ago, i totally agree range differences are HUGE (@9mins). the initiation range of blink dagger + ability could be 5 flash distances away in league terms. It took me a while to be comfortable being closer to enemy champions in the mid game.
It probably took me 200 normal games + to untether myself from what had been purely intuition in dota2.
I specifically remember playing jarvan in aram in my like 20th game and feeling like this is a short range initiation lol, i had no idea.
I started off in support with a friend and he was telling me what to do and i would ask questions on why for a while till i moved to mid
The Jarvan engage range feeling short as piss compared to something like Blink Slardar or Blink ES is real tho loool. Honestly a large part of why Zac ganks feel so bull in LoL because not many other champs have such crazy engage range without having to expend a global ult.
Bro you describing iron and low bronze really made me feel like i deserve to be there. My rank is inflated because my mechanics are really good but i am full braindead when it comes to actually playing out a match. If i didn’t have the mechanics i would easily drop from plat to bronze 1 at best. I try to improve my macro and i do a lot of research and studying but i can’t get anything to stick. The best way i can describe it is imagine having a completely empty head, its almost like being in a dream where things are just happening to you, nothing makes sense, and all you can do is react. It’s a really hard place for me to be in because when i play other games I have very high levels of comprehension and can see 15 steps ahead and predict and aggress, i even reached top 100 players NA in PUBG back in the hayday. However, I’ve been playing league since 2012 and for this game alone I’ve never had the ability to read and understand the game, which is why i keep playing because its the one game i can’t mentally lock in with and solve.
I mean, if you play ADC mechanics are the most important by far, so you absolutely deserve the rank.
Emerald is the new Elo Hell. I've gotten 2 accounts to Master and guess what I spent the most time struggling in Emerald because your opponent is good enough that you don't just shit on them every game and your team is stupid enough to throw a game whenever they want and you CAN NOT control them because your team is either /deafen or /mute all and your ping is limited so you can't even shot call your team to do anything
From my expierience I was stuck in silver, gold elo for 4 years starting from 2016
One thing that boosted me to master elo is to draw conclusion every play you make
even if the play was good you need to ask yourself what you couldve done better... And most important is to mute all
I really liked the points about Emerald. From playing in Emerald a LOT, I'd like to add something to the poor attitude: People claim the game is over early and give up, even though both teams are likely to make several game-throwing decisions in the next 20 minutes. AKA the players are good enough to recognize a throw, but no one is good enough to take full advantage of those throws.
I think this was a very interesting youtube video. I have a group of friends that have been playing league for probably like 5+ years at this point I was there for most of the groups start. One of my friends and myself have played for 10+years and are both High diamond players consistently. Most of the group is around High silver to High gold and one friend being a low plat player. The concepts you talk about and what rank should have said concepts is way far off in our group. Most of everyone in our group knows what to do but just doesn't do it Since myself and my friend have been there to help answer questions and walked them through it. For example, Trading patterns wave control and like obj. control but they fail to actually put it into practice. for example in one of our games I was playing supp and my friend told me he was gonna freeze the wave when there wasn't a freeze possible and was just creating a slow push. So i don't know if my friends are brain dead or just bad at the game. regardless thanks for sharing your thoughts on league.
At first I was kind of insulted by the long term platinum comment, but I was stuck in plat 2-1 during seasons 5-8. I got emerald the instant it was released so I guess it makes more sense if you look back at most like 3 years
Hey Curtis and Matt, do you have any tips on how to deal with people taking over your lane? As in they walk mid and play there instead of bot or top. What can I focus on to improve when that happens?
I first started playing in season 8… it took me that entire season to figure out what CS was 😂
Always struggle with these generalizations because an individual’s rank is completely tied to “team” performance.
I really enjoyed the overall concepts you guys brought to the table. Just something about emerald, but also about the current state of the game: Emerald is just all over the place. There is absolute no consistency whatsoever. In the same match, you have a player that goes 40k damage in a 30 minutes game, and 2 other players that go 8k damage in those same 30 minutes. That is so wrong. It just blatantly shows the clear difference in players skill. And its like that every game. I'm a Pantheon OTP top, and every single game I am the top damage of my team, and half of the time of the entire game. All the while my mid, ad or jungler dont get over 8k damage. I understand support doing little damage, but surely not the other roles. And surely not in emerald. I'll always accept that my friend who peaked Silver will never get past 15k. He is just not good at trades, at making real use of his abilities and all. But I can't accept that from a emerald player. Hell man, even when I go support with something like Nautilus, Thresh, whatever, I go 20k damage or close to it.
I'll add something here: I try playing to improve most of the time, if not all the time and I always try to understand what I could have done bette, what I did wrong, etc. But it's so frustrating having to play games where if I do one or two mistakes, it's simply over, because my teammates will most surely not pick up any slack, because of how badly balanced is emerald right now. I'm forced to play to pixel perfection because, most times, at least 2 teammates are barely gold level of gameplay. That's frustrating, bro. Really is. It's too taxing on mental.
I’m not sure they read the comments, but I was wondering if they could do a podcast about server differences, like if you are challenger in LAN are you really challenger or just mid diamond on a “normal server”, and generally stuff like that in terms of server comparison.
im hardstuck emerald 1 and nathan is totally right, im just super inconsistent and emotional
hey i was wondering if u guys have a "how to play from behind" , like more so about how to "lose lane gracefully" and what "playing with intensity" means video
Playing with intensity is just a catchall phrase for locking in/focusing up/don't play lazily. Some examples of improving your intensity when playing:
-Think about things in the loading screen (lane match up? how u want to play the lane? where is the enemy JG starting? what are u trying to improve on this game?)
-Minimize external distractions: Turn off music, exit Discord calls (barring duo Q), take care of your needs before playing (bathroom break, shower, meals, sleep, etc.)
-Playing with the intent to do EVERYTHING possible to win and improve, and not just "getting in some games of league because I'll eventually rank up if I'm playing"
3 blocking helps with it because it's naturally harder to play better as your brain tires out from more and more games
4:31 Had a friend that insisted on playing kindred adc, mostly because they were afraid of jungle role. I'd guess most of these off roles are just wanting to play the champ, but not wanting to go for another role. Or are duoing with someone on x role already...
[JUNGLE ONLY NA PLAYER] I've never gotten past platinum (albeit I started in Season 13 Pre-season), and I pray to God I can get back this rank soon. They hit platinum jungle right on the nail. I have mastery of basic jungling so I get 30 kills in draft pick or silver+ every game. But the games I lose or int a little, it's because I autopiloted and saw that (for example) the amumu had ult and i saw the lux is river with him so I'll just egotrip and go lose the 1v2 because i get one shotted.
I like this setup, but I just want to say that i went to grandmaster by being a one trick pony and playing safe and not being very adaptable or all around. But I guess I could be the exemptions from your good points and i could just feel that i could not go to challenger, because thats the time where its better to be versatile with other champions in different team setups, which i couldnt do and thats why i felt like i was stuck there and not able to climb further.
As a perma plat player. It's mainly because I don't put in the games to get to emerald. I play at most 50 games a split or a year depending on how may I need for competitive.
i legit thought i was looking at the same person editing himself in on the other side of the screen
Listening to that makes me certain that I'll never be able to get out of Iron.
If i need to know all ranges, damages and abilities for all champions to even get out of Iron... I simply don't have enough time 😮
There’s no rush!!! It’s all your own pace, it’s all just here to enjoy and be on your own journey
It's pretty damn easy to know every ability and it's range. Jus spam arams or norms .Took me a month of playing normals/Aram when I first started game 2 years ago to learn it all
@Harlem6J highly doubtful, unless you have endless time each day
@@SCIISeth well I played after 1-2 hrs most days of week back then lol.
I’m a former s3 gold player and ngl I see iron footage that looks mechanically way more sophisticated than anything I’ve ever done or seen in my games
… yeah safe to say I’m never touching ranked bc I know where I’ll end up
As someone who was bronze in 2022 and iron as a returner, I feel like the iron one is a bit simplified. Most iron players aren't that bad at their champion, runes and items but we are terrible at virtually all other areas of the game. Sure, there's a few outliers who are easier to fight than a bot, but that isn't the norm. For me the main problems in iron is being unable to escape ganks (even if I'm 10/0 the jungler can just kill me as a mage and take bounty), being late to fights, profound lack of vision (what even is in vision score I use all my wards), and if I don't play yuumi then low cs (2-4) becomes a problem.
By playing yuumi I can fix being late to fights, needless deaths, low gold, gank vulnerability and lack of endgame influence and it gets me s ranks but she is useless solo and I'm trying to main xerath for more agency.
Thx for the video tho it helps a lot :D
6:00 50 champs when it cam out? bro. season one were maybe 15-20 champs haha
p.s. i am an emerald mid. got a lot of free time lately. played only this split over 100 matches on mid. and u guys are so right. i miss sometimes the small details of what i can do with my champ and what not. and yes. i am completely losing my mind xD
I always wanted to hit platinium and I finally hit it when they added emerald. All my friend told me that I wasn't trully platinium because old platinium is new emerald so I just grinded too emerald because of it.
Love this content
I was platinum as a peak for literally years.
Then Emerald got introduced.
So then I got to emerald, diamond and straight through to master xD